text:
Guess Who Got The Key To Detroit?
Saddam Hussein donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Detroit church and received a key to the city more than two decades ago, soon after he became president of Iraq.
The events contrast sharply with the attack Saddam's regime is now facing from a U.S.-led coalition, reflecting his changed relationship with the United States since Washington helped Saddam covertly in his 1980-88 war with Iran.
Saddam's bond with Detroit started in 1979, when the Rev. Jacob Yasso of Chaldean Sacred Heart congratulated Saddam on his presidency. In return, Yasso said, his church received $250,000.
"He was very kind person, very generous, very cooperative with the West. Lately, what's happened, I don't know," Yasso, 70, said Wednesday. "Money and power changed the person."
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.
Yasso said that at the time, Saddam made donations to Chaldean churches around the world.
"He's very kind to Christians," Yasso said.
Chaldeans are a Catholic group in predominantly Muslim Iraq. Among prominent Chaldeans is Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz.
A year later, Yasso traveled with about two dozen people to Baghdad as a guest of the Iraqi government, and they were invited to Saddam's palace.
"We were received on the red carpet," Yasso said.
Yasso said he presented Saddam with the key to the city, courtesy of then-Mayor Coleman Young. Then, Yasso said, he got a surprise.
"He said, `I heard there was a debt on your church. How much is it?"' Yasso said.
Saddam donated another $200,000.
In the 1980s, Iraq and the United States were allied in their mistrust of Iran, which held hundreds of Americans hostage under the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Yasso called Saddam an American puppet.
"The job the United States trusted to him is done; now he's no good," he said.
There are tens of thousands of Chaldeans among the roughly 300,000 Americans of Middle Eastern descent in the Detroit area. About 1,200 families attend Sacred Heart, said Yasso, who came to the United States in 1964.
Some church members disagreed that Saddam was once kind.
"When he became president, I leave everything and run away," said Nadhim Franco, 66. "I came here. I was dishwasher. I came here, I was happy."
for more features.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Recently we've been shopping for light fixtures, and have noticed a dramatic increase in non-standard bulbs. CFLs in particular seem to be drifting away from the common threaded base, in favor of 2-post snap in bulbs.
I know there are efforts underway to remove incandescent bulbs from shelves, and I don't necessarily disagree with this. But I'm worried about having to find or keep on hand hundreds of different types of bulbs for my light fixtures rather than a consistent size and base.
So... Is the standard base becoming a thing of the past? Is a new standard clear on the horizon, yet? Should I try to stick with screw-base fixtures, or is diversity likely to be okay in the long run?


text:
IN JUNE, climate scientist David Keith and his neighbors in Calgary, Alberta, were ripping carpets and drywall from their flooded homes — again. In 2005, a "flood of the century" had shattered city records. The 2013 flood was even bigger and forced 100,000 residents to flee to higher ground.
To Keith, the city's second 100-year flood in less than a decade seemed a little ironic. Calgary is the nerve center of Canada's oil industry, including tar-sands giant TransCanada, developers of the Keystone XL pipeline, and home to plenty of folks who don't seem to worry much about climate change. Maybe, Keith mused in an e-mail from the flood zone, this latest example of extreme weather would be "a bit of a reality check."
Or maybe not. Resistance to global-warming alarms goes well beyond the corporate boardrooms of the oil business. There have been repeated international pledges for deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions in order to slow the greenhouse effect, in which carbon dioxide gas traps solar radiation in the lower atmosphere. Yet global emissions keep rising. While several developed countries, including the United States, have recently managed to reduce the amount of carbon they pump into the atmosphere — thanks to a major shift from coal to lower-carbon natural gas, an uptick in both efficiency and in renewable energy use, and, last but not least, the global economic slowdown — these cuts have been canceled out by rising emissions from China and other rapidly developing nations. This inertia, and a growing feeling of alarm in the scientific world, has turned Keith into a leading advocate for the real-world testing of sometimes drastic measures that might cool the planet, collectively known as geoengineering.
For decades, geoengineering — which describes various technical proposals, from the seemingly straightforward to ideas that sound like they were dreamed up on Star Trek — was a dirty word among environmental scientists, who wanted less messing with nature, not more. But with carbon dioxide emissions rising and political forces having little global impact, it's an idea now openly debated at scientific and policy forums. At the same time, it has gone from a side interest of Keith's to a full-time gig, including writing a book, A Case for Climate Engineering, that comes out next week.
Skeptics think geoengineering is hubristic overreach that is bound to backfire — either by removing the impetus to cut emissions or by causing new problems for the climate, or both. Keith welcomes the debate, but he bristles at being cast as gung-ho. The risks of climate tinkering are real, Keith says. But willful ignorance is riskier. Left unchecked, a warming climate could one day cause enough harm that mounting pressure to do something, anything, to cool the planet quickly would leave few other options. If that day comes, he says, we'd better know what we're doing.
ONE EVENING about a month after the Calgary floods, Keith was back in Cambridge attending a geoengineering forum at MIT. He had left a job at an energy policy institute at the University of Calgary in 2011 for Harvard, where he has a joint appointment at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Kennedy School of Government. The transition to Cambridge from Calgary, where his two kids are finishing high school, has been slow, and Keith has spent the last couple years shuttling between the cities.
That night in Cambridge he was the last of four panelists to arrive, and he bounded up to the front of the room — a lanky 49-year-old sporting black jeans, a cream-colored button-down, and a fresh scruff of beard. As audience members scurried for the last few seats, Keith gobbled a banana, his dinner, and used those few minutes to scroll through his phone.
So it goes lately for Keith, who has become a one-man geoengineering band. In addition to teaching, writing, and attending speaking engagements and far-flung scientific symposiums, he runs a start-up company that plans to build and operate giant "scrubbers" to remove carbon dioxide from the air and then sell the gas to energy companies; they'll send it deep underground to increase pressure in oil wells and extract hard-to-reach crude, leaving the gas buried, or feed it to algae engineered to make it into biofuel. The scrubbers — which use a chemical reaction similar to one that's been used in the paper, pulp, and other industries for decades — are among the less risky geoengineering ideas. Many scientists question whether they can cost-effectively help cool the planet, but few fear they'll do much harm trying. Far more controversial is another idea Keith wants to test — spraying a cloud of tiny particles of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere to reflect the sun's heat back into space and keep it from warming the Earth. The idea isn't new, and neither is the strident opposition. Even Keith would love to avoid it. What is new, however, is that many of Keith's peers are starting to agree that it's time to take it seriously.
BACK IN THE late 1980s, Keith was a doctoral student in experimental physics at MIT, but he began to feel as if his chosen field didn't deal with any "big real-world problems." So he hooked up with a group of other graduate students in the Boston area who were all interested in the emerging issue of global warming. The group, from diverse disciplines, was organized by Edward Parson, then a doctoral student at the Kennedy School and now an environmental law professor at UCLA.
"There was a slow-brewing alarm" at those gatherings but no panic, recalls Parson, who has remained a friend and collaborator of Keith's. "We never imagined that 25 years later we'd still be waiting for the first serious steps to address the issue."
This was when Keith began to read about geoengineering. Cooling the earth by mimicking volcanoes was first proposed in the mid-1970s by the Soviet climate scientist Mikhail Budyko. A general idea of such a scheme was even included in a report on the environment given to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. But the risks of a warming planet weren't really on the national radar at that point. When the issue reemerged in the 1980s, cutting carbon dioxide emissions was the only remedy under consideration.
In 1991, Keith turned down a job offer to do laser physics at Caltech and opted instead for a postdoctoral fellowship in climate policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. That same year, Mount Pinatubo exploded in the Philippines. The eruption killed hundreds and shot about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Global temperatures dropped about 1 degree Fahrenheit for two years. In 1992, Keith included stratospheric sulfur among other options in a paper he published that was titled "A Serious Look at Geoengineering."
"The possibility of unpleasant surprises in the climate system justifies a more coherent (though not large) research program in order to define fallback options needed to make reasonable policy choices," he wrote.
Nobody outside the climate policy world paid much attention to Keith's paper. He went on to do other climate-related projects, eventually joining the University of Calgary in 2004, and once again the "fallback options" for cooling the planet collected dust.
In August 2006, another geoengineering article changed everything. It wasn't so much what it said. What mattered was who said it. The author was Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric chemist who had won a Nobel Prize. Crutzen wrote that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was "by far the preferred way" to deal with warming. But these efforts had so far been "grossly unsuccessful."
What Keith had called fallback options Crutzen called an "escape route," and he, too, lobbied for research. The scheme Crutzen thought had the most promise was the same one that Keith, working with Harvard atmospheric chemist James Anderson, now wants to study — injecting reflective sulfur into the stratosphere.
The two would loft a balloon and release about 1 kilogram of very fine sulfuric acid droplets, then measure the effects of the spray: how the particles disperse or clump together, and the extent to which they trigger ozone-damaging chemical reactions. The amount they would release in their experiment is trivial, says Keith, less than the emissions from a trans-Atlantic airplane flight.
Evidence from computer models, and actual sulfur-spewing volcanoes, suggests that at a much larger scale, spraying these particles into the air could reflect enough sunlight back into space to cool the planet quickly and relatively cheaply. The cooling would be temporary, so the spraying would need to be ongoing, until deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions could pick up the slack. In this case, the worry isn't so much that it won't work, but that it will, with ugly side effects. There are several potential environmental harms from spraying sulfur, including damage to the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation.
But because Crutzen was awarded his Nobel for studying ozone depletion, "nobody could claim that he didn't take ozone destruction seriously," Keith says.
Suddenly, geoengineering was discussed openly and everywhere. Over the next few years, there were several high-level scientific conferences about whether, when, and how we should try to come to the climate's rescue. Influential think tanks and scientific academies, including the Bipartisan Policy Center and the British Royal Society, called for research.
Perhaps even more worrisome than the predictable harms, however, is the likelihood that monkeying with the climate could produce unwelcome surprises. What if geotinkering radically alters the monsoons over Southeast Asia or triggers widespread droughts in Africa? What if it suddenly dims the sun over vast stretches of cropland? Who controls the Earth's thermostat? What if it makes life miserable in a nuclear-armed country that demands we stop spraying or else?
Keith, like other proponents of testing, says we'll never answer all the "what ifs," but the only way to deal with many of them is real-world research and international discussions about geoengineering governance — the rules and regulations that would guide future research and possible deployment. Uninformed choices made in a crisis, he says, are usually bad ones.
He picks the year 2020 as a date when world leaders might become so alarmed by the havoc wreaked by global warming that they are ready to push the geoengineering button. Then he works backward, counting the years needed for basic research, developing and testing hardware for delivery and monitoring, attempting larger-scale research, and crafting the necessary international agreements and regulations. "Realistically," he concludes, "if you want to start doing this in 2020, then we should have started the research a decade ago."
Critics of this view fear that real-world geoengineering experiments, no matter how small or how well planned, will start us on a slippery slope to full deployment. "Small-scale tests will forever be regarded as inadequate and pressure will come to bear to move swiftly to larger-scale interventions," concluded a 2009 report by ETC Group, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to sustainable development and conservation. "This pattern is familiar to people who know the history of genetically modified crops and nuclear weapons."
Earlier this year, in an effort to allay such fears, Keith coauthored a piece in the journal Science proposing that any small-scale research efforts be accompanied by an international moratorium on large-scale implementation of stratospheric sulfur spraying. "Anybody who thinks geoengineering will work perfectly and have no risks is a nutjob," says Keith. But, he believes, we need to begin the research now to determine when, if ever, we might consider it worth the risks.
This isn't a simple cost-benefit analysis for Keith. It's personal. As an only child growing up in Ottawa, Keith and his dad went on countless canoeing, birding, and hunting outings. After college, he took a year off to explore wilderness areas from the California desert to the high Arctic. He spent four months with scientists studying walruses, the first of many extended wilderness treks. Keith says these experiences awakened a kind of primal attachment to nature, something he doesn't hesitate to call love.
Climate-change debates focused only on flooded cities, failing crops, and mass extinctions are neglecting that deep-seated motivation for urgent action, says Keith. Even if we live in a wealthy nation and a warming planet poses no immediate threat to our existence, he says, "there's some value in preserving the natural world simply because we love it and it's the world we inherited."
AFTER CRUTZEN'S ARTICLE came out, money started flowing. In 2007, the British billionaire Richard Branson announced the Virgin Earth Challenge — a $25 million prize for the best "commercially viable" way to scrub the atmosphere of greenhouse gases. That same year, Bill Gates set up a climate and geoengineering research fund — a few million dollars a year to support Keith and Ken Caldeira, a climate researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who studies ocean acidification and does geoengineering research with computer modeling. In addition, the fund supports other climate and geoengineering projects chosen by Keith and Caldeira. Gates also invested in Keith's company.
This rush of interest made for strange bedfellows. Calls for geoengineering research were coming from conservation scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund, but also from right-wing policy shops and military consulting firms such as the RAND Corp. In fact, one of geoengineering's early backers was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, and among today's foremost supporters is Teller's protege, Lowell Wood, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
For some people, the fact that billionaires, military contractors, and doomsday weaponeers are all discussing schemes to control the climate is reason enough to fear and oppose geoengineering. The conspiracy-minded figure that Keith, with his Bill Gates money and his business interests, likely knows the secret geo-clique handshake. They send him tons of e-mail and postcards addressed to "Dr. David 'Strangelove' Keith" accusing him of helping the government covertly spray aluminum, barium, magnesium, and other metals in the atmosphere, either for climate control, population control, or mind control. There have been two death threats. During an interview, Keith plays snippets of voice mails he recorded for police.
"You are an evil, evil, evil, evil, evil liar!" a man hisses in one. "Weather geoengineers are the lowest scum ever born!"
Beyond the conspiracy theories, however, is the legitimate fear that some powerful forces would love to find an easy way out of global warming — and those forces include voters who don't feel like paying more for gas or changing their light bulbs or enduring the economic hits that would surely come with the radical emissions cuts many scientists say are needed. Plus, because carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere, it might take a century after those drastic emissions cuts before we felt any of the climate benefits. Asking people to sacrifice now for their great-grandchildren is a hard sell, and many people fear that geoengineering will completely sap the political will to cut emissions.
It's a fear Keith shares. He mentions it almost every time he writes or speaks about geoengineering, declaring that it should only be a stopgap measure, something we might want to use to hold the ship together while we make the real repairs. Yet, if geoengineering one day becomes a viable option, how it's used may not be up to sober scientists or even thoughtful policy wonks, notes Simon Nicholson, an American University international relations professor who wrote a chapter on geoengineering for the Worldwatch's "State of the World 2013" report.
"As soon as this conversation becomes more mainstream, I think you'll see corporate actors and political actors and individuals who are well-meaning saying, 'We now have the solution to the world's problems,' " Nicholson says in an interview.
A related critique, by the Australian philosopher and ethicist Clive Hamilton, is that geoengineering springs from the same faith in technology and the same hubris that got us into this mess. It lets people ignore the possibility that "there's something profoundly wrong in our economic and political system," Hamilton said on the progressive news show Democracy Now! "because geoengineering comes along and says, 'Well, look, the system can solve the problem.' "
While Keith admits that technology can be "grossly misused," he doesn't buy the idea that our drive to develop new tools and technologies is inherently destructive. Usually, he contends, the consequences of human invention are both good and bad. "You're always inventing new things to fix the last thing," he says. "Do I think [geoengineering] will create some new problems that we'll have to fix? Of course." But he doesn't think that necessarily justifies doing nothing as the polar icecaps vanish and small island nations sink beneath rising oceans.
"A thing you often get in climate policy is people from the academic world who naively assume you need to know all the answers before you make a decision," Keith told the audience at the MIT geoengineering forum. "But the reality is, we make a decision by doing it, or by not doing it, every day.
"There's no getting to certainty here."
Chris Berdik lives in Dorchester. Send comments to firstname.lastname@example.com.


text:
SIXT car rental Iisalmi, Finland
Why use RentalCars24H.com?
- No Hidden Charges
- Lowest price guarantee
- You are guaranteed a car from a leading supplier
- Amend or cancel your booking online quickly and easily
- Break Down Assist
Car rental in Iisalmi
Car rental near Iisalmi
Car rental in airports near Iisalmi
Kuopio - Airport [KUO]
42.33 mi / 68.13 km -
Kajaani - Airport [KAJ]
52.54 mi / 84.55 km -
Jyväskylä - Airport [JYV]
92.73 mi / 149.24 km -
Joensuu - Airport [JOE]
99.29 mi / 159.78 km
On RentalCars24h.com you can compare SIXT car rental in Iisalmi with other companies to find the best car rental deals and prices in Iisalmi. We compare all rates of popular car rental companies in Iisalmi.RentalCars24h.com shows you the car rental Iisalmi price including all the insurances and taxes. Pay only the price you see – no hidden services or additional payments with RentalCars24h.com!
Use our car rental form to compare SIXT car rental Iisalmi prices with such companies as Enterprise , Budget , AVIS , Hertz , Thrifty , Alamo , Dollar , Fox , Payless , Ace , National , Europcar , E-Z and 800 more companies. You have a variety of choice – so choose only the best car rental price among all the existing suppliers!


text:
Economists may still be lukewarm about the recovery but here's an encouraging sign: Wage growth just hit a three-year high, according to a new report from PayScale.
National wage growth jumped 1.4 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to PayScale, the highest it's been since the fourth quarter of 2008.
Of course, that means we're back where we were in about 2008 — but at least things are going in the right direction.
In fact, wages have been going up at a good clip for the past four quarters, PayScale reports. When wage growth goes up in an industry, that's a reflection of demand in the industry — companies are willing to pay more to retain talent in those areas.
"Things are looking good," said Katie Bardaro, the lead economist for PayScale. "For the first time in a while, people can start to feel confident about where the economy is heading."
She cites three specific factors for the optimism: Employment has been going up for the past few months, consumer spending is going up and wages are going up.
What's more, we're seeing decent growth, not just snail-paced growth.
"In general, the recovery can no longer be qualified as sluggish," Bardaro said.
So let's cut to the chase: Who can really say "Show me the money" like Cuba Gooding, Jr. in "Jerry Maguire?"
Pay increases are strong in jobs related to energy, particularly high-skilled jobs, as the price of gasoline rises. Plus, workers in mining, oil and gas exploration and utilities are seeing "substantial pay increases," according to PayScale. Mining, oil & gas exploration saw wages jump 4.9 percent in the first quarter from a year ago, while the utililies industry saw a 3.9 percent increase.
More important, sectors that took a huge hit during the recession — transportation and construction — saw a noticeable improvement in compensation. They came in third and fourth for annual pay growth, according to PayScale, with growth of 2.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. In fact, the construction industry beat out previous winners such as health care and IT for annual pay growth in the first quarter, according to PayScale. Pay for health-care jobs, IT, science and biotech went up just 1.5 percent.
That being said, it doesn't mean demand or wage growth for health care and IT are drying up — those industries remain strong, Bardaro said.
Of course, when there are winners there are always losers and in the first quarter, that was the food-service industry. After being flat to lower for two years, wage growth there has declined for two straight quarters.
Bardaro attributed that to a few factors: First, going out to eat at restaurants is one of the first things consumers cut back on in tough times, so the restaurant business has been down for the past few years, as have tips from the people who were still going out to eat.
Second, this is an industry where you have a low ceiling for wage growth: You get to a certain point in your pay increases and employers don't necessarily feel the need to keep raising your pay. They can hire a new waiter, waitress or dishwasher for less money.
Recent college grads, pay attention to this next part: Geographically, the strongest areas for wage growth and job demand were Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Those areas are dominated by industries that are doing well. So, in Seattle, that's IT, biotech and engineering; in Houston, of course, it's oil; in Philadelphia and DC it's a lot of biotech and research.
Also, Bardaro said, those areas are likely to continue to see solid growth in 2012.
"The areas that were strong performers and weathered the recession will likely continue to be strong growers," Bardaro said. "Whether it's extremely high growth is a little up for discussion but in no way do I see them dropping or falling flat."
Large companies still gave out the biggest raises, with pay up 2.5 percent at large companies, compared with 1.7 percent for medium companies and 0.7 percent for small companies.
This recession, and the blow the job market took as a result, is a good lesson for college grads to do their homework on what industries they seek to go into, as well as what cities they seek jobs in.
That's not to say if you hate hospitals you should go to medical school, it's more to say that if you're an accountant, lawyer or other profession that can be employed across a variety of industries, your job outlook is better for doing those things at a health-care or oil company than, say, a food-service company. Likewise, there are more job opportunities in certain cities that have thriving industries.
Any way you slice it, the report is an encouraging sign for the job market — and the economy.
"I think people no longer have to whisper about the recovery, they can actually say it out loud in conversation," Bardaro quipped.
You don't have to tell me twice.
Let's do this.
More From CNBC.com: Email us at email@example.com or drop a line in the comment box below.
More from The Pony Blog: ponyblog.cnbc.com


text:
Baja team places in top-10 overall
Team heads to Washington for next event before hosting Baja World Challenge at RIT in June
Rochester Institute of Technology's SAE Baja race team is preparing for its next competition in Washington state, May 16-19, after a successful opening contest in Tennessee. RIT Racing placed ninth overall among 85 U.S. and international collegiate design teams competing April 18-21 at Tennessee Tech in Cookesville, Tenn.
The team was in first place going into the third day of competition. They were on the leaderboard, placing first in the land maneuverability event, third place in both the suspension and traction and design categories. In two other dynamic events, sled pull and acceleration, the RIT car placed sixth. It proved to be a good first outing for the team, says Tim Brogan, team manager.
"We did really well the first two days of the competition. However, during the Endurance Race, we encountered some problems," says Brogan, a fourth-year mechanical engineering technology student in RIT's College of Applied Science and Technology. "We now know what the problems are with the car and we know how to solve them. So we are really excited for the next two races in the series."
RIT will host the Baja World Challenge June 6-9. One hundred teams registered for the event, last held at RIT in 2009. Teams will begin the World Challenge at RIT's Gordon Field House and Activities Center at 8 a.m. on June 7 with static events—technical inspections in addition to design and cost presentations. On June 8 and 9, all dynamic events take place at Hogback Hill Motocross in Palmyra, N.Y.


text:
Microsoft will offer Windows 7's ribbon-style application interface to Windows Vista users in an update this October, according to the company.
As first reported by Long Zheng, the blogger who writes the popular istartedsomething.com, Microsoft will provide Vista users an optional update that installs the code necessary to display Windows 7's Ribbon framework on its predecessor.
The framework, called "Scenic Ribbon," is a derivation of the ribbon-esque "Fluent" user interface that debuted in Office 2007 two years ago. Both feature a wide ribbon-like display at the top of a window that replaces the traditional drop-down menus, small icons and toolbars that have standardized Windows applications' look-and-feel for decades. Office 2007 faced serious resistance from some users over the ribbon when it launched, although that has subsided over time.
More recently, complaints mounted over plans by OpenOffice.org to overhaul the interface of that open-source productivity suite. Some have blasted the organization for parroting Office 2007's ribbon.
"The Office ribbon sucks. Please don't copy it," wrote one user in a comment to a Sun Microsystems blog. Sun contributes engineering and developer time to OpenOffice.org.
Earlier this year, Microsoft said the ribbon interface would be used by both Microsoft and third-party developers to distinguish new applications for Windows 7 from older versions that ran, say, on Windows XP or Windows Vista.
"This is one of the things we think will differentiate apps written for Windows 7, as opposed to those for earlier versions of Windows," said Mike Nash, the head of Microsoft's Windows product management, in an interview with Computerworld last January.
That plan seems to be in tatters now. Starting in October, application developers will be assured that new software they've crafted to include the Scenic Ribbon interface will also run on Vista.
"A Windows 7 interoperability pack, known as the Windows 7 Client Platform Update, is to be released alongside Windows 7 in October of this year," said Karl Bridge, a Microsoft programming writer, in a message posted last week to a forum on the MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) site. "This update provides down-level support for the Windows Ribbon framework and will be made available from the Microsoft Download Centre and as a 'Recommended update' on Windows Update."
Bridge added that the update will support all versions of Vista, including the entry-level Home Basic and Starter, which for Vista has been sold only in a limited number of markets overseas.
Application developers who build software with Windows 7's ribbon interface will have to point users to Windows Update or Microsoft's download site to grab the Client Platform Update, or silently call Windows Update as part of setup, Bridge said.
Microsoft's most visible "ribbonised" Windows 7 applications are the revamped Paint and retooled Wordpad, the basic image editor and word processor, respectively, bundled with the OS.
Windows XP users will be out of ribbon luck, however, as the October update will not apply to the eight-year-old operating system.


text:
Export 1 results:
Filters: Author is Pailian, Hrag [Clear All Filters]
Hierarchical structure is employed by humans during visual motion perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, 24581 - 24589 (2020).
CBMM Memos were established in 2014 as a mechanism for our center to share research results with the wider scientific community. Click here to read more about the memos and to see a full list of the memos.


text:
America and the World
The future of the world trading system will be largely determined in the US Congress over the next few months. After three years of dithering, President Clinton has launched an intensive effort to obtain new "fast track" negotiating authority that would enable the United States to resume active participation in regional and global trade negotiations. The American outcome will be decisive for the international trading order for four reasons.
First, the United States remains the only plausible leader of far-reaching trade initiatives. As recently as 1993-94, the Clinton Administration dramatically reinforced that traditional American role by galvanising the final global agreement on the Uruguay Round in the GATT, concluding NAFTA, and winning political commitments to achieve free trade in the Western Hemisphere and the Asia Pacific. Using residual negotiating authority that carried over from the round and building on previous domestic legislation, the Administration drove to completion the recent worldwide agreements to eliminate tariffs on information technology products and to liberalise telecommunications services - the two main global advances since the end of the round in 1993. The European Union (EU), which is the only other potential global leader, will be too preoccupied with creating the euro and expanding its membership to provide leadership of world trade for some time.
Second, the trade policy credibility of the United States will totally evaporate if it sits on the sidelines for the next four years-the minimum result of a failure to win new negotiating authority. The United States led the agreement of the 34 democracies in the Western Hemisphere to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The United States turned the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), whose 18 members comprise half the world economy, into a substantive organisation by initiating annual summit meetings in 1993 and supporting its agreement to achieve "free and open trade and investment" by 2010 (for its industrialised members ) and 2020 (for the rest). The United States insisted that the World Trade Organisation agree to resume negotiations on agriculture, services and other central issues by 2000. American withdrawal from these initiatives would doom them all, threatening a reversal into protectionism.
Third, American leadership has been crucial in assuring the compatibility, indeed the complimentarity, of regional and global liberalisation. Some purists have condemned the United States for deviating from the exclusive pursuit of multilateral agreements. But American strategy has promoted regional arrangements (starting with its pact with Canada and extending through NAFTA to the current FTAA and APEC initiatives) partly to press the more inward-looking EU and others to move ahead on the global path. Now that so many regional arrangements are in place or underway, America's defection could throw the whole process into reverse. Key groups-the EU, Mercosur and perhaps some new Asian groupings-could forget the global track and bring to life the much feared nightmare of a world of hostile trade blocs.
Fourth, American trade policy itself could suffer irreparable harm from a failure of the current legislative effort. The United States is in its seventh year of expansion with unemployment and inflation at their lowest in decades. Its chief competitors in Europe and Japan remain mired in prolonged slumps. President Clinton was decisively re-elected a year ago and remains extremely popular. If the United States cannot pursue trade liberalisation now, when will it ever be able to?
A failure, or a severe limitation on the use of new authority (e.g., to add only Chile to NAFTA), would represent a stunning victory for organised labor and others that oppose globalisation. Such a victory would be led by Congressman Richard Gephardt, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, and a likely presidential candidate in 2000. The United States has not had a protectionist President for a century (though Ronald Reagan's wrong-headed macroeconomic policies produced a spate of new import quotas) but such an outcome is by no means impossible if the present debate were to misfire. The countries that have taken out insurance policies against a US reversion to protectionism via free trade agreements, Canada and Mexico, have not idly overcome their historical aversions to getting into bed with their superpower neighbor.
The Global Impact
Would all this be so serious for the rest of the world? After all, the United States is no longer hegemonic in economic terms. Its share of world output has dropped below a quarter and its share of trade is even less. The EU is larger on both counts and the creation of the euro will end America's monetary dominance. Moreover, globalisation has enormous momentum. Big trade agreements have been proceeding without America. The EU brokered an interim financial services agreement in 1995 when America chose to stay out, is expanding its membership and heading toward mostly free trade with its Mediterranean neighbors by 2010, and is pursuing agreements with Mercosur and Mexico. Subregional pacts such as Mercosur and the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement are moving ahead. Canada and Mexico have concluded their own free trade agreements with Chile.
All these deals hurt the United States, by creating or threatening discrimination against it,-but this is nothing more than turnabout for America's own preferential compacts. The global problem is that American disengagement would puncture, and probably destroy, the prospects for consummating the extraordinarily promising scenario for world trade that has evolved since the end of the Uruguay Round and is now poised to proceed. That scenario has two related elements.
The first is credible implementation of the two huge regional free trade agreements launched in 1994, the FTAA and APEC. Their conversion from political pledges to practical realities would provide huge new reductions of trade barriers. It would also bring irresistible pressure on the EU and others to avoid the risk of facing costly discrimination by joining a new global liberalisation initiative.
APEC is particularly crucial to this strategy. Because of it's size, its pledge in 1994 to achieve free trade in the region is potentially the most far-reaching economic agreement in history. At the same time, its devotion to "open regionalism" means that it will offer to extend its liberalisation to non-members. The EU has always said that "it will not be left behind if APEC does what it says it will do," as was indeed the case with the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) a year ago. APEC thus dramatically magnifies America's own effort to continue reducing global barriers.
The second element in the global scenario would then be a major new effort in the WTO, perhaps the "Millennium Round" called for by Sir Leon Brittan or at least a simultaneous "round-up" of key issues as proposed by my colleague Jeffrey Schott. As in the past, rounds or round-ups that include a number of issues and sectors will be needed to meet the diverse interests of the full WTO membership and permit the necessary tradeoffs across topics that produce far-reaching liberalisation. It is true that the ITA and the telecommunications agreement represented victories for the sectoral approach but talks on maritime services collapsed and the outcome of the current renewed effort on financial services is unclear. A broader approach will almost certainly be required to provide substantial global progress.
Once all the regional arrangements are on their way to being realised, about two-thirds of world trade will in fact have achieved, or be headed toward, barrier-free status. The WTO membership would then recognise that global free trade was a practical reality and guide the next round(s) by setting an explicit goal of reaching that milestone-perhaps by 2010 on the APEC and Euromed models. The WTO's director-general Renato Ruggiero, the Canadian government, and the declaration of the WTO's ministerial conference in Singapore last December have all already endorsed variants of that prospect.
In addition, this scenario would decisively counter the risk that the regional pacts will become sources of new international conflict. Mr. Ruggiero has put it nicely: regionalism will undoubtedly continue to proliferate so the issue is whether the groupings go off on their own, with possibly disastrous consequences, or increasingly fuse into a common global context that eventually wipes out their preferential features. The latter outcome is obviously superior but the chances of reaching it would be severely jeopardised by a prolonged period of American inaction.
There would be even bigger cost to the world from a failure of the Clinton fast-track effort: an enormous boost to the backlash against globalisation. Such a backlash is evident almost everywhere, from striking workers in France to the tirades of Malaysia's prime minister against international investors. There is some justice in the complaints. On balance, globalisation is clearly good for every country, but many governments have been slow to erect the necessary domestic complements. Without adequate safety nets to cushion adjustment burdens, and worker training that will convert potential losers into winners who can take advantage of the better jobs and higher wages that become available, political support for globalisation may be impossible to sustain.
In this environment, victory for the anti-globalisation forces in the United States could have terrible global consequences. Defensive reactions would surface almost immediately, especially in the Asian and Latin American countries that depend most heavily on the American market. China, Russia and others could lose interest in further liberalisation and joining the WTO. A half century of global economic opening could stall or even be thrown into reverse.
The broader international credibility of the United States would of course suffer severely as well, with substantial implications for international politics and even global security. It would be impossible for America to withdraw from such a central component of international affairs, or indeed repudiate initiatives undertaken with great fanfare by its own president and his predecessors, without jolting confidence in its staying power in other respects.
Doubts about a sustained American presence would become particularly acute in Asia, where security considerations are a central (if largely unspoken) rationale for APEC, adding to future risks in the world's most volatile region. It would be the ultimate irony if "the only remaining superpower" entered the twenty-first century with a policy of disengagement on the very issues which most of the world, with the end of the Cold War, now places at the top of the international agenda.
The Outlook
International considerations aside, the case for Congressional passage of new negotiating authority is overwhelming from a narrowly American standpoint. Exports have generated one third of all economic growth in the United States over the past decade. Export jobs pay 10-15 percent more than the average wage so a further shift of American production into exports would help counter the stagnation of incomes that has been our central economic and social problem for a generation. Global competition has played a major role in checking inflationary pressures and thus enabling the United States to achieve much lower levels of unemployment, without foregoing price stability, than anyone envisaged just a few years ago.
Moreover, the United States has already eliminated most of its trade barriers so little can be lost from further trade agreements, in the way of jobs or lower wages, whatever one thinks of their past results. (The remaining barriers, notably high textile and agricultural tariffs, can be phased out over prolonged periods as in NAFTA.) By contrast, the huge and rapidly growing nations of Asia and Latin America retain extensive controls. Hence any moves toward regional or global free trade will primarily benefit the American economy by providing additional impetus to exports.
But the NAFTA debate in 1993 provides a stern warning. The Congressional vote on it should have been trivial: NAFTA amounted to a 4% expansion of the American economy, to include a country that accepted virtually every demand placed upon it in the negotiations and which made virtually all the concessions. The result, however, was the fiercest battle over trade in the United States since the Smoot-Hawley tariff. The vote was almost lost.
Even more important, a large majority of the American public views NAFTA as a huge loser for the United States-despite the fact that the peso crisis, which had nothing to do with NAFTA, caused the sharp deterioration of America's trade balance with Mexico and despite the fact that NAFTA protected both the United States and Mexico itself against a Mexican protectionist relapse. "NAFTA" has in fact become a dirty word in Washington.
Both President Clinton and Robert Dole, who supported the agreement, banished trade from the campaign debate (and policy agenda) in 1996. No one talks any longer of "extending NAFTA" even to Chile, referring instead to "a new free trade agreement" with that country (and perhaps several others). Opponents of any further trade agreements seek to tar the entire process with the NAFTA brush. When I testified before the Senate Finance Committee on fast track in June, all 18 Senators present indicated their support but 16 said their voters disagreed and that they were not sure how long they could continue taking a different stance.
One key requirement in the debate will thus be to distance the new negotiating authority from NAFTA. Moreover, the remnants of American protectionism will not yield easily. Textile, apparel and agricultural interests cling to their remaining tariffs. Antidumping procedures, and other forms of process protectionism in America, which cause such consternation around the world, are fiercely defended by the industries they protect, their lawyers and their Congressional supporters.
The deeper problem is that "NAFTA" and "new trade agreements" represent a convenient proxy for the vast impersonal forces of the contemporary global economy that continue to produce deep anxieties in many Americans, notwithstanding the length and depth of the current expansion. White collar and professional, as well as blue collar and unskilled, workers share these insecurities. The US Government has been weakening its already-inadequate safety-net just when increased support is needed to alleviate fears of displacement. Better education and training are of course the constructive answers to the problem but, despite valiant efforts on the part of the Administration, our educational system is highly decentralised and will take many years to repair, and virtually all the government's training efforts to date have failed miserably.
Nor has the Administration covered itself with glory. After brilliantly implementing, and to some extent augmenting, the trade strategy inherited from Reagan and Bush in 1993-94, it fell into a series of largely unproductive bilateral bashings. It ran from trade throughout the Presidential campaign in 1995-96 and has been slow to restart the process-giving opponents a long head start, the same mistake that almost cost it the NAFTA vote in 1993.
Its trade officials have done the best they could without new authority, negotiating the information technology and telecommunications pacts, but have focused on narrow sectoral and bilateral opportunities rather than pursuing the big-picture initiatives (such as a new "Clinton Round" in the WTO and "global free trade") that have historically captured public imagination and thus galvanised political support in the United States. The White House has strained relations with its strongest trade supporters, the business community, dithering endlessly with trivial issues like international labour standards that could provide only the tiniest help for their purported beneficiaries. The Treasury Department has increased the difficulties by promoting an excessively "strong dollar" that undermined American competitiveness and has pushed the trade and current account deficits to record levels of nearly $200 billion.
The outcome is thus uncertain as well as pivotal. In the end, the United States usually gets things right. But it often makes major and costly mistakes along the way. The entire world has an enormous stake in this one. It should be watching very closely as the drama unfolds, and making every effort to support a constructive outcome by indicating its clear willingness to proceed along a constructive course if the United States is enabled to play its full part. Any other outcome would be enormously costly to the world as a whole as well as to the United States itself.


text:
Reversals of Earth's Magnetic Field During the Past 160 Million Years
Sometimes Earth's magnetic poles switch places. That is called a magnetic reversal. The graph below shows how often magnetic reversals happen. The graph starts (left side) 160 million years ago in the Jurassic Period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The right side of the graph shows today. The black and white stripes along the bottom of the graph show the direction of Earth's magnetic field. Black stripes mean Earth's magnetic field was "normal" (like it is today). White stripes show times when the field was reversed. |
Did you notice that there isn't much of a pattern? Sometimes the magnetic field goes 40 million years or longer without changing once. Look at the Cretaceous Period around 100 million years ago. Other times the magnetic field changes pretty often. Sometimes it flips back and forth several times within a million years. Earth's magnetic field has been "normal" for the past 780,000 years. Scientists call this time period the Brunhes normal. Click here for a closer look at magnetic reversals over the past 5 million years. Click here to compare the past 5 million years with the past 160 million years. |


text:
I watch as my friend's inner German, never far from the surface, kicks into high gear as we step into Über'm Rhein (Over-the-Rhine), a historic neighborhood once separated from downtown Cincinnati by the Miami and Erie Canal and nicknamed the Rhine by the many German immigrants who settled here through most of the 1800s.
Looking at the broad, tree-lined streets fronting around 940 ornate three- to five-story brick edifices built more than a century ago, he sees its past: a bustling area with the only daily German language newspaper in the country and where German was the language at home and on the streets. I see its present: trendy shops, art galleries and studios, businesses and restaurants housed in the largest collection of Italianate architecture in the U.S.
While he marvels at the exteriors with their brightly painted and elaborately worked scrolls and cornices, I poke inside the shops located below. I longingly look at the urban style furnishings and accent pieces at Joseph Williams Home and wonder if I can possibly fit into the red dress in the window at Couture Couture Boutique, before ducking into Iris BookCafe for tea. A haven for lovers of rare, used and collectible tomes, the book store and cafe offers a revolving exhibition of local arts.
I peruse the works of local and regional artists at MiCA 12/v, a family owned store dedicated to "world domination of small design lines, handmade items and local fine craft" (their words not mine, but you have to love the concept). I tarry over the black beaded bracelets and then, my attention diverted by the journals made from vintage book covers, I select two for upcoming birthday gifts.
At Taste of Belgium, we order sweet and dense Liège waffles thick enough to be eaten like donuts and paper-thin Nati crepes filled with roasted peppers, onions, Provolone cheese and goetta (a popular German concoction of pork, oats and spices).
We stroll through the 8-acre Washington Park to walk off at least a portion of the goetta. The park is fronted by the 1878 High Victorian Gothic Revival style Music Hall, a grand pile of red pressed bricks molded into 2 1/2-acres of turrets, garrets and gables.
Not far beyond is the bustling Findlay Market, a swarm of indoor and outdoor food vendors. When the market first opened in 1855, Eckerlin Meats was one of many catering to German tastes. Now there are Vietnamese baguette sandwiches at Pho Lang Thang and handcrafted seasonal gelatos at Dojo Gelato. But to Rick's delight, Eckerlin remains as well, still selling sausages, meats, cheese and, of course, goetta.


text:
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Actions by the Trump administration are triggering double-digit premium increases on individual health insurance policies purchased by many people, according to a nonpartisan study.
The analysis released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that mixed signals from President Donald Trump have created uncertainty "far outside the norm" and led insurers to seek higher premium increases for 2018 than would otherwise have been the case.
Republicans in Congress have not delivered on their promise to repeal and replace the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Trump is insisting that lawmakers try again and that the health overhaul is collapsing. At the same time, he's threatened to stop billions of dollars in payments to insurers. Some Republicans are considering fallback measures to stabilize markets.
Kaiser researchers looked at proposed premiums for a benchmark silver plan across major metropolitan areas in 20 states and Washington, D.C. Overall, they found that 15 of those cities will see increases of 10 percent or more next year.
The highest is a 49 percent jump in Wilmington, Delaware. The only decline: a 5 percent reduction in Providence, Rhode Island.
About 10 million people who buy policies through HealthCare.gov and state-run markets are potentially affected, as are 5 million to 7 million more who purchase individual policies on their own.
Those in the government-sponsored markets can dodge the hit with the help of tax credits that most of them qualify for to help pay premiums. But off-marketplace customers pay full freight, and they face a second consecutive year of steep increases. Many are self-employed business owners.
The report found insurer participation in the ACA markets will be lower than at any time since they opened for business in 2014. The average is 4.6 insurers in the states studied, down from 5.1 insurers this year. In many cases insurers do not sell plans in every community in a state.
The researchers analyzed publicly available filings through which insurers justify their proposed premiums to state regulators. Insurers are struggling with sicker-than-expected customers and disappointing enrollment, and an industry tax is expected to add 2 to 3 percentage points to premiums next year.
On top of that, researchers found that mixed signals from the administration account for some of the higher charges. Those could increase before enrollment starts Nov. 1.
"The vast majority of companies in states with detailed rate filings have included some language around the uncertainty, so it is likely that more companies will revise their premiums to reflect uncertainty in the absence of clear answers from Congress or the administration," the report said. Once premiums are set, they're generally in place for a whole year.
Insurers that assumed that Trump would make good on his threat to stop billions in payments to subsidize copayments and deductibles requested additional premium increases ranging from 2 percent to 23 percent, the report found.
Insurers that assumed the IRS under Trump would not enforce unpopular fines on people who remain uninsured requested additional premium increases ranging from 1.2 percent to 20 percent.
"In many cases that means insurers are adding double-digit premium increases on top of what they otherwise would have requested," said Cynthia Cox, a co-author of the Kaiser report. "In many cases, what we are seeing is an additional increase due to the political uncertainty."
That doesn't sound like what Trump promised when he assumed the presidency.
In a Washington Post interview ahead of his inauguration, Trump said, "We're going to have insurance for everybody."
"There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can't pay for it, you don't get it," he added. "That's not going to happen with us."
People covered under President Barack Obama's law "can expect to have great health care," Trump said at the time. "It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better."
But the White House never produced the health care proposal Trump promised. The GOP bills in Congress would have left millions more uninsured, a sobering side-effect that contributed to their political undoing.
The administration sidestepped questions about its own role raised by the Kaiser study.
Spokeswoman Alleigh Marre said rising premiums and dwindling choices predate Trump.
"The Trump administration is committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare and will always be focused on putting patients, families, and doctors, not Washington, in charge of health care," Marre said in a statement.
The turmoil for people who buy individual health insurance stands in sharp contrast to relative calm and stability for the majority of Americans insured through workplace plans. The cost of employer-sponsored coverage is expected to rise about 5 or 6 percent next year, benefits consultants say.
This article has been corrected to show that the average number of insurers in the states studied is 5.1 in this year, not 5.7.
Associated Press Health Writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.
Kaiser report: https://tinyurl.com/ya2yneqj
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


text:
No doubt there are those Thomases who can't help but be Toms. The always-affable Tom Hanks, for instance.
Then there are those who defy diminution. Such is the case with first-time film actor Thomas Horn. The 14-year-old Jeopardy! whiz kid holds his own against the Oscar-winning likes of Hanks and Sandra Bullock, who play his parents in Warner Bros.' 9/11-centered drama "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."
In 2010, producer Scott Rudin was among those TV viewers impressed by Horn's display of steely nerves and card-shark cool after he wagered $12,000 in Final Jeopardy and won $38,100 with the answer: "What is a census?" That led to an audition for the role of Oskar Schell, a brainy but socially isolated lad left adrift after his father dies in the World Trade Center attacks.
The movie is heavy-duty, and so is its star. This still-sprouting, beacon-bright ninth-grader, who hails from the San Francisco area, doesn't suffer fools nor foolish inquiries gladly.
Jokingly asked if he is going to answer questions in the form of a question, Jeopardy!-style, Horn simply rolls his eyes, slightly grimaces and remains silent. He also would rather keep some personal info under wraps.
This son of an oncologist mother and an ophthalmologist father speaks three languages. Besides English, he is fluent in Croatian, thanks to his mother's side of the family. And he is studying Mandarin. "I just thought it would be a great, useful language to learn because it's the most widely spoken first language."
Unlike some showbiz youngsters, acting was never a goal for Horn. His only other experience was as a grasshopper in a fifth-grade stage performance of James and the GiantPeach. But his time as an insect did nothing to prepare him for being in almost every scene — and narrating a good portion of the action off-screen — of a major Hollywood production.
check out the trailer:
As an 11-year-old loner who feels let down by his mother and lost without his father, Horn must run the gamut of emotions from extreme joy to incredible grief. He also must be somewhat irritating since his character exhibits signs of Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism. But with the help of dialogue and acting coaches, as well as supportive co-stars who had his back, Horn delivers what director Stephen Daldry calls "one of the greatest screen performances by a young actor in the history of cinema — he is exceptional."
Horn returns the compliment. He says of the British filmmaker behind such acclaimed titles as "Billy Elliot" (which also features an exceptional boy) and "The Hours": "He really let me have my creative take on things, even though, as a first-time actor, I don't really deserve it. Whenever he thought I could use a suggestion, he would give one. But in a really kind way and without hurting my feelings. I'm kind of a sensitive, thin-skinned person, so it's a great achievement."
Both Hanks and Bullock looked out for their on-screen son and got a kick out of watching him fully embrace the task at hand.
"He started off with a degree of comfort and never changed," says Hanks. "He was constant as the speed of light. If only we could steal his ability to focus the way he does. His concentration was rather off the scale sometimes."
Bullock did feel compelled to provide some etiquette pointers now and then, especially given Horn's habit of stomping when he walks. "He would blow by us women," she says. "Coming out of a stairwell, he would just blow by and push the door open. I told him, 'OK, with ladies, you need to stop, open the door and stay.' You could just feel him going, 'Oh, this is such a nuisance.' "
Horn is up for doing more films and has read some scripts. Still, college definitely looms. As for a major, he says, "probably something practical, like computer science and math." Though he is too young to remember the events of 9/11, Horn understands why some moviegoers might have mixed feelings about revisiting the tragic day.
Yet the theme of the film, he says, is ultimately a positive one: "Grief, no matter where it comes from, can only be resolved by connecting to other people."
(Opening across the Philippines on Feb. 29, "Extremely Loud; Incredibly Close" is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.)


text:
Despite fretting over all the security and traffic restrictions in London, Britons appear to be warming up to hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics. A warm yellow glow, to be exact.
The yellow is the color of the lights on the London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel on the River Thames that has been been programmed to reflect the mood of the country toward the Olympics, as measured by the tone of the social-media messages Twitter users are sending. The lights on the Eye change color depending on the tone detected in those messages, with yellow indicating a positive mood. On Monday night, for example, two thirds of the sphere glowed yellow.
The Eye's light show was engineered by a Boston company, Sosolimited, which devised a system that analyzes the content of Olympic-related tweets and calculates a collective national mood, based on the occurrence of words in the messages like "amaze,'' "fear," and "tears'' that suggest emotion.
Sosolimited was engaged for the unusual job by Ignite, a brand-marketing firm hired by EDF Energy, the Eye's sponsor and the official supplier of electricity for the Summer Games. The company was looking for a way to highlight the intensity of Olympic fever in Britain.
Sosolimited, which was founded by three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent four months coming up with the technology behind Energy of the Nation, the Twitter-fueled light show taking over the city's icon for the next two weeks.
"We look at every tweet coming out of the UK and scan them through emotional dictionaries looking for phrases," said Sosolimited cofounder Justin Manor, who created software for what appears to be the world's first social-media light show.
The company worked on the project with Mike Thelwall, an information science professor at the University of Wolverhampton, who devised an algorithm to detect emotions in tweets.
The system scans tweets that are signed with one of 30 Olympic-related hash tags, such as #London2012 and #Energy2012, to see if they contain words that are in a "sentiment" dictionary that Thelwall devised. Each tweet gets a positive or a negative rating. Words such as "win" and "gold" would indicate a positive view of the Olympics; words such as "lame" and "chaos" a negative view, which would be reflected in the lights on the Eye turning purple.
The algorithm adds up the sum of the sentence and gives it a score. If it's somewhere in the middle it's portrayed as green, for neutral.
Throughout the day, tweets flash on a Jumbotron at what's dubbed Mission Control, located on a barge at the base of the Eye. Here emotions are charted and top-trending words flash on the screen leading up to the nightly show.
The numbers behind the math are pretty hefty. Sosolimited is analyzing some 80,000 messages a day, with the numbers expected to climb once the games begin.
Throughout the United Kingdom there are about 10 million Twitter users, and the London Games have been called the first "Twitter Olympics."
At 9 p.m., Sosolimited's "visual concert" begins. First the day's mood is reflected on the Eye. If, for example, 63 percent of the tweets expressed positive feelings toward the Olympics, most of the Eye would be lit yellow, with the remainder of the circle being black.
For the rest of the show, where images like smiley or sad faces are flashed, a yellow hue remains.
"We are showing how the mood is changing throughout the day by compressing 24 hours of data and comments into 24 minutes of animation," Manor said.
Sosolimited has an unusual history to go along with its unusual project. The three founders started out as a performance group before forming an art and technology studio that strives to present data in fresh ways. It has created avant-garde visual installations, from a "snow globe" in the window of HBO's retail store in New York that is activated by passersby to a "remix" of the Obama-McCain 2008 presidential debates that made visual pastiches from the video, audio, and text of the candidates.
Sosolimited did a similar political performance for the 2010 prime minister debates in England, which won the company notice in London.


text:
Coaches value players who have their head in the game, but a new study finds that may not be the healthiest thing for soccer players. Those who head the ball most frequently, the study showed, had damage in brain areas similar to that seen in people with concussion.
The brain changes were found in players who headed the ball 1,000 to 1,500 times a year — which amounts to a few times a day — but not in those who did so less frequently. Reporting the findings at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting in Chicago this week, the study's author said the effects of heading may be cumulative — appearing not after the occasional header, but building up over time in players who frequently use their heads to play.
"I'm not advocating banning heading, but there may be a threshold level, which we defined, that indicates a safe range of heading," said author Dr. Michael Lipton, associate director of the Gruss Magnetic Resonance Research Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, in a statement.
The researchers used a type of brain scan known as diffusion tensor imaging to examine the brain tissue of 38 amateur adult soccer players in New York City, who said they had been playing since childhood. Players reported heading the ball more than 400 times a year on average. Those in the top 25% of heading frequency had an average 1,320 headers in a year, and these players were most likely to show injury in regions of the brain that play a role in cognitive functions, including attention, memory, planning, organizing, physical mobility and high-level visual functions.
"These are changes in the brain that are similar to those we see with a concussion or TBI," said Lipton. In previous research, these players also showed lower scores on tests of memory and reaction time.
The evidence linking brain injury and heading has been inconsistent so far. For its part, the American Academy of Pediatrics says there isn't sufficient data to recommend that young players abstain from heading, but does suggest that players minimize contact between head and ball.
The new study is small and not peer-reviewed, so it must be considered preliminary. But the author said it was a compelling reason to pursue further study; other experts agreed that more study was necessary to determine what the implications might be for soccer players, especially younger ones who may be more vulnerable to brain injury and for those who practice daily, doing frequent heading drills.
More than 250 million people play soccer regularly, according to FIFA, the sport's international governing body. In the U.S., at least 18 million people play soccer, 78% of them under age 18.
Meredith Melnick is a reporter at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeredithCM. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.


text:
photo by David McClister
John Hiatt
John Hiatt
Every two years or so, John Hiatt makes a record that gives music critics and DJs at those few radio stations worth listening to in America something to agree on. Which is to repeat, this time in the words of WUTC-FM's Richard Winham, "John Hiatt is the best songwriter you've never heard of, but you've almost certainly heard his songs." It's sadly true, but after 40 years, Hiatt has long made peace with this bit of cruel irony.
Hiatt, as he will tell you, tells me, tells anyone, really, doesn't write songs for anyone else. Never has, never will. John Hiatt writes John Hiatt songs—tough, gritty roadhouse-ready rock and roll and poignant "this-is-what-I've-learned-about-love" relationship songs that give you pause and make you think out loud, "Damn, where has this guy been all this time?"
Turns out, he's been around for a long, long time, and those same songs have caught the ears of others who've done with them what he has not—with few exceptions—been able to do: turn John Hiatt songs into hit records.
The short list: Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris—hell, even Ronnie Milsap—have covered Hiatt songs and made more than a few hits of them. "Thing Called Love" helped Bonnie Raitt come back from cutout-bin obscurity in the 1980s. "Angel Eyes" dovetailed into perfect harmony with Jeff Healey's too-short career. Clapton and King built an entire double-platinum album out of Hiatt's Riding With The King in 2000.
Hiatt shrugs it off, enjoys the royalties and keeps on writing, playing and hitting the road with various versions of the bands who record his music—20 albums' worth now (if you count live discs and compilations)—that stretches back to 1974's Hanging Around The Observatory and is now bookended by his latest, Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns.
At 59, Hiatt's never had a Top 40 hit of his own, but that fact neither haunts him nor deters him. At 21, he wrote "Sure As I'm Sittin' Here," a No. 16 charting hit for Three Dog Night that earned him a record deal with Epic and he's never looked back. The idea that he'd write hit songs has likely occurred to Hiatt many times. At one point he very likely relished the idea, maybe still would. But these days a hit song doesn't enter Hiatt's consciousness very often. He is flattered that so many artists, some of them personal heroes he grew up listening to, have covered his songs, but says he was never comfortable writing for anyone but himself.
"I don't write for other people, never have," he tells me during a phone conversation. He was speaking from his longtime Nashville home, during a break from his recent tour, before making the short trip to Track 29 for his first Chattanooga performance since he can remember. "I love what I do and I just have a real passion for it. I love writing and recording—hell, I don't know how to do anything else."
That's not exactly true—he'd probably be racing on the Indy circuit (and has) in another career—but modern American music would be much worse off were it not for Hiatt, and songwriting would be devoid of one of its finest craftsman. After years bouncing around record labels where he was variously (and futilely) categorized as new wave, country or blues, Hiatt found his own successful niche with the release of Bring the Family. This 1987 record marked the beginning of a rich, remarkable and uncompromisingly excellent period of songwriting and recording featuring his own flinty, whiskey-and-cigarette-aged vocals.
"I had not had success out of the box," Hiatt says of his early efforts. "Success gains you freedom at record labels, so they keep intervening. [Bring The Family] was the first record we got to make on our own, independently. I was so screwed up, learning to live without drugs and alcohol, I didn't know what to do. The producer said, 'You can just sing in the shower and we'll release it.' "
Sobriety unleashed something. Hiatt released seven albums on three labels prior to Bring The Family. Each had their moments, as Hiatt gathered critical momentum and a solid fan base, thanks to relentless touring in the U.S. and overseas. But mainstream success eluded him. His influences—Elvis (Presley and Costello), Dylan, the blues and country—produced erratic, often critically acclaimed records, but each failed commercially. Nuggets from these years ensconced him as songwriter to the stars. A young Rosanne Cash latched on to "The Way We Make A Broken Heart," dueting with Hiatt on the song in 1983. The song went unreleased until Cash re-recorded it and took it to No. 1 on the country charts in 1987—the same year Hiatt released Bring The Family.
That seminal record, recorded with a supergroup that included Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and drummer Jim Keltner (who would together briefly form a side project dubbed Little Village), touched a nerve. Independence—from alcohol, drugs, record labels—marked a turning point for Hiatt, reflected in a song he says he would not mind being remembered for, "Have A Little Faith In Me." Again, a string of other artists—Joe Cocker, Delbert McClinton, Jewel, Jon Bon Jovi—nabbed the song for their own, but Hiatt's own voice rose above them all.
Nine successive albums all broke the Billboard 200, including Slow Turning, the follow-up album to Bring The Family that included such hits as "Paper Thin," "Tennessee Plates" and "Angel Eyes." But it was Bonnie Raitt's version of "Thing Called Love" from her 1989 album, Nick of Time, which reached No. 11 that year and helped re-boot Raitt's own floundering career, that earned him the most acclaim as a songwriter. More records, countless tours and another label (A&M) followed that success.
Not much has changed in the intervening years, Hiatt insists, besides the ability to record and release records on his own. "That certainly helps," he says of his indie status, "being able to make records that I want to make when I want." His latest is the ninth since departing A&M after Perfectly Good Guitar.
Hiatt now writes and records his own records in his Franklin studio and leases them to New West Records, with whom he's had a fruitful relationship since 2003's Beneath This Gruff Exterior. His prodigious output—more than 700 songs and counting—he says, is simply a matter of occupation, and, he has joked, aging. "I'm running out of time," he's said on more than once occasion.
These days, Hiatt consistently releases noteworthy albums that have earned him the sort of high praise—if not multimillions—that those who have recorded his songs are more often associated with. It is not unusual to see the terms "national treasure" and "icon" tagged to his name, though he blanches at such sobriquets.
His music is neither influenced nor tied to moments in time, although you'd get that sense from his most recent album covers, which reflect a "Grapes of Wrath" grit and weariness that echo the nation's economic plight. Hiatt is not a "message" songsmith in the mold of his fellow Indianan, John Mellencamp. Instead, he deals in the politics of life, family—the joy, the pain and day-to-day moments that underscore his best love songs—and, occasionally, the reckless abandon of his youth.
"All my songs are message songs," he says, turning my question around. "I'm talking to the people—that is political. Causes and such is not something I deal in. It's not my thing. There are other people much more knowledgeable than me in that arena."
Politics may not appeal to Hiatt, but the ravages of disaster, natural and otherwise, pockmark his songs. Dirty Jeans is filled with references to monumentous events from the past few years. From floods and blizzards to remembrance of 9/11, Hiatt brings an emotional resonance—felt if not explicitly expressed—to his songs that form boundaries.
Speaking recently to another interviewer (Hiatt does lots of interviews) he reflects upon the events of recent years, connecting his lyrics to the everyman assessment of life he's become known for. Not the really big stuff; just the stuff of daily life we all muddle through and can connect to and relate with.
"The 2010 flood in Nashville tore up some of our place and thousands of people lost their homes," he told one reporter. "It didn't get much national attention because there weren't enough lootings—not enough bad news. Then, we did a winter tour and every city we went to got hit by a blizzard. The songs that came out of that were about the impermanence of things—the constant shifts of people and things."
Even after 25 years of marriage, Hiatt still regards his love affair with similar impermanence, as if it will flutter away with the prevailing winds. His love songs—"relationship" songs, really—chart his comfort levels, affirm his core beliefs and celebrate small tendernesses—but the songs don't get any easier, he says. "Love songs are still the hardest songs to write because they can become corny so quickly."
In "I Love That Girl," he writes of such "corny" affirmations, singing, "And she wakes me with coffee and kisses my head/And starts to explain about something she's read/I say, 'Darling, you haven't heard a word that I've said'/And I love that girl."
You can't help but find something in common with Hiatt's scenes from a relationship and I ask him how is wife responds to such valentines. "She likes 'em for the most part," he says with a laugh. "She'll say things like, 'That's nice.'"
Unintentionally, it seems, the corniness of Hiatt's sentiments are the ones the ring most true and he mines the mundane as if these fleeting moments that pass us all by will disappear, unremarked upon. Love, Hiatt, seems to say, is what happens when you're not paying attention.
Such moments, along with a healthy dose of rock and roll, Indiana-style—hot cars, fast women and nights under the bleachers—and the wicked sense of humor that Hiatt brings to his live show, combine into something he regards as the epitome of his essence. Even for an artist who has lived from eight tracks to digital downloads.
"Nothing beats live," he says, seeming to anticipate the road shows ahead of him. "You can't download live and that's the most exciting part. We've got a great little four piece band, it's rock and roll, the classic setup and we've been rocking all over the country—the shows have been a blast."
John Hiatt's road goes on forever, it seems. We're lucky to catch a glimpse.
John Hiatt performs Thursday, Nov. 17, at Track 29.


text:
Top 10 highest-paid CEOs
Here are the 10 highest-paid CEOs of 2013, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive pay research firm:
1.Anthony Petrello, Nabors Industries, $68.2 million, up 246 percent
2.Leslie Moonves, CBS, $65.6 million, up 9 percent
3.Richard Adkerson, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, $55.3 million, up 294 percent
4.Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor, $39 million, up 510 percent
5.Philippe Dauman, Viacom, $37.2 million, up 11 percent
6.Leonard Schleifer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, $36.3 million, up 21 percent
7.Robert Iger, Walt Disney, $34.3 million, up 46 percent
8.David Zaslav, Discovery Communications, $33.3 million, down 33 percent
9.Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner, $32.5 million, up 27 percent
10.Brian Roberts, Comcast, $31.4 million, up 8 percent
NEW YORK - They're the $10 million men and women.
Propelled by a soaring stock market, the median pay package for a CEO rose above eight figures for the first time last year. The head of a typical large public company earned a record $10.5 million, an increase of 8.8 percent from $9.6 million in 2012, according to an Associated Press/Equilar pay study.
Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose following a decline during the Great Recession. The median CEO pay package climbed more than 50 percent over that stretch. A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker's salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.
The best paid CEO last year led an oilfield-services company. The highest paid female CEO was Carol Meyrowitz of discount retail giant TJX, owner of TJ Maxx and Marshall's. And the head of Monster Beverage got a monster of a raise.
Over the last several years, companies' boards of directors have tweaked executive compensation to answer critics' calls for CEO pay to be more attuned to performance. They've cut back on stock options and cash bonuses, which were criticized for rewarding executives even when a company did poorly. Boards of directors have placed more emphasis on paying CEOs in stock instead of cash and stock options.
The change became a boon for CEOs last year because of a surge in stocks that drove the Standard & Poor's 500 index up 30 percent. The stock component of pay packages rose 17 percent to $4.5 million.
"Companies have been happy with their CEOs' performance and the stock market has provided a big boost," says Gary Hewitt, director of research at GMI Ratings, a corporate governance research firm. "But we are still dealing with a situation where CEO compensation has spun out of control and CEOs are being paid extraordinary levels for their work."
The highest paid CEO was Anthony Petrello of oilfield-services company Nabors Industries, who made $68.3 million in 2013. Petrello's pay ballooned as a result of a $60 million lump sum that the company paid him to buy out his old contract.
Nabors Industries did not respond to calls from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Petrello was one of a handful of chief executives who received a one-time boost in pay because boards of directors decided to re-negotiate CEO contracts under pressure from shareholders. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold CEO Richard Adkerson also received a one-time payment of $36.7 million to renegotiate his contract. His total pay, $55.3 million, made him the third-highest paid CEO last year.
The second-highest paid CEO among companies in the S&P 500 was Leslie Moonves of CBS. Moonves' total compensation rose 9 percent to $65.6 million in 2013, a year when the company's stock rose nearly 70 percent.
"CBS's share appreciation was not only the highest among major media companies, it was near the top of the entire S&P 500," CBS said in a statement. "Mr. Moonves' compensation is reflective of his continued strong leadership."
Media industry CEOs were, once again, paid handsomely. Viacom's Philippe Dauman made $37.2 million while Walt Disney's Robert Iger made $34.3 million. Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes earned $32.5 million.
The industry with the biggest pay bump was banking. The median pay of a Wall Street CEO rose by 22 percent last year, on top of a 22 percent increase the year before. BlackRock chief Larry Fink made the most, $22.9 million. Kenneth Chenault of American Express ranked second with earnings of $21.7 million.
Like stock compensation, performance cash bonuses jumped last year as a result of the surging stock market and higher corporate profits. Earnings per share of the S&P 500 rose 5.3 percent in 2013, according to FactSet. That resulted in an average cash bonus of $1.9 million, a jump of 12.9 percent from the prior year.
More than two-thirds of CEOs at S&P 500 companies received a raise last year, according to the AP/Equilar study, because of the bigger profits and higher stock prices.
CEO pay remains a divisive issue in the U.S. Large investors and boards of directors argue that they need to offer big pay packages to attract talented men and women who can run multibillion-dollar businesses.
"If you have a good CEO at a company, the wealth he might generate for shareholders could be in the billions," says Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "It might be worth paying these guys millions for doing this type of work."
CEOs are still getting much bigger raises than the average U.S. worker.
The 8.8 percent increase in total pay that CEOs got last year dwarfed the average raise U.S. workers received. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said average weekly wages for U.S. workers rose 1.3 percent in 2013. At that rate an employee would have to work 257 years to make what a typical S&P 500 CEO makes in a year.
"There's this unbalanced approach, where there's all this energy put into how to reward executives, but little energy being put into ensuring the rest of the workforce is engaged, productive and paid appropriately," says Richard Clayton, research director at Change to Win Investment Group, which works with labor union-affiliated pension funds.
Investors have become increasingly vocal about executive pay since the recession. This has led to an increasing number of public spats between boards of directors, who propose pay packages, and shareholders, who own the company. These fights become public during "say on pay" votes, when shareholders have an opportunity to show they approve or don't approve of pay packages. Votes are non-binding, but companies sometimes act when there is clear disapproval from shareholders.
Petrello was the best-paid CEO largely because the board of directors of Nabors Industries' wanted to end his previous contract. Under that contract, Petrello could have been owed huge cash bonuses, and the company could have paid out tens of millions of dollars if he were to die or become disabled. The board changed his contract following "say on pay" votes in 2012 and 2013 that showed shareholders were unhappy with how Nabors paid its executives.
There have been other signs of shareholder concern about CEO pay. This month, 75 percent of Chipotle Mexican Grill shareholders voted against a proposed pay package for co-CEOs Steve Ells and Montgomery Moran. Ells earned $25.1 million in 2013 while Moran earned $24.3 million, a 27 percent rise in compensation for each. Chipotle spent $49.5 million on CEO pay last year, the fourth highest in the S&P 500.
"Companies are now taking the time to think through their pay practices and are talking more with shareholders," says Hewitt of GMI Ratings. "There's still a long way to go but pay practices are getting better."
To calculate a CEO's pay package, the AP and Equilar looked at salary as well as perks, bonuses and stock and option awards, using the regulatory filings that companies file each year. Equilar looked at data from 337 companies that had filed their proxies by April 30. It includes CEOs who have been at the company for two years.
One prominent name not included in the data was Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is typically one of the best paid CEOs in the country.
Oracle files its salary paperwork later in the year, so Ellison was excluded in the 2013 survey data. He was awarded $76.9 million in stock options for Oracle's fiscal year ending May 2013, according to proxy filings.
Among other findings:
- Female CEOs had a median pay package worth more than their male counterparts, $11.7 million versus $10.5 million for males. However, there were only 12 female CEOs in the AP/Equilar study compared with 325 male CEOs that were polled.
- The CEO who got the biggest bump in compensation from 2012 to 2013 was Rodney Sacks, the CEO of Monster Beverage. Sacks earned $6.22 million last year, an increase of 679 percent. Monster's board of directors awarded Sacks $5.3 million in stock options to supplement his $550,000 salary and $300,000 cash bonus.


text:
"Thermodynamics of Ising Systems of the Triangular Kagome Lattice and Small-Model Approximations to Geometrically Frustrated Systems
Bilin Zhuang received her B.A. degree with majors in Physics and Chemistry from Wellesley College in June 2009. She conducted her undergraduate thesis research in the thermodynamic properties of frustrated Ising systems under Professor Courtney Lannert in Wellesley College. Her thesis research, supported by the Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship, focused on modeling the thermodynamic properties of extended two-dimensional frustrated Ising systems with much smaller systems of less than 30 atoms. Upon graduation, she received the Phyllis J. Fleming Prize for distinction in physics as well as the Jean V. Crawford Prize in chemistry. Currently, she is employed by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (Singapore) and works on theories related to MRAM devices. She intends to pursue PhD studies in theoretical physics or chemistry starting in Fall 2010.
Leo Kadanoff, Chair, A. Chodos, M. Zeller, J. Eckert, B. Partridge, C. Lannert, M.E. Parks, A. Bienenstock


text:
Introducing the KEY TAG project! Show your love-for-linking with a special new key tag. WHY are the key tags special? OH. Because they're goregous and there aren't very many. LINKwithlove doesn't make money. Or have money. But that's not what it's about. It's about spreading the word that linking to the original creator is the best way to share intellectual property and inspiration online. And sharing is awesome.
HERE'S HOW IT WORKS: each key tag is actually TWO key tags and your mission is to break them apart and give one to someone who doesn't know about what it means to link with love. This campaign is about linking + sharing + spreading the word. Be the change. Support a great cause. And look amazing.
Front + back. They are a bright + professionally printed recycled plastic that come scored to break apart into TWO separate key tags. BAM! Get yours before they're gone! [$3 each] There are 200 tags available in ROUND2. THANK YOU SO MUCH - ROUND1 SOLD OUT IN 4 days!!
By TALKING about it - we can make sharing inspiration online better. Because there is better to do.
Key tags are available here. For less than a latte - you will be supporting a good cause*. And creating change. GET YOURS.
*like domain hosting + consulting.
These keytags are available from kalbarteski.com's online shop only.


text:
Cal takes on Illinois in Redbox Bowl
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Coverage starts at 12:30 p.m. on KTVU Fox 2
As a defensive-minded coach trying to find his way in college football, California's Justin Wilcox was naturally drawn to watching tapes of Lovie Smith's teams at Illinois. When the two coaches got together a few weeks ago to promote Monday's Redbox Bowl, Wilcox was like a kid at Christmas.
"I used to study him all the time. He's an excellent coach," Wilcox said. "We had a media event two weeks ago and I got to spend part of the day with him. I probably bothered him, I was asking so many questions, but it was really cool for me."
Smith, whose coaching path has taken him to the NFL and back, is equally a fan of Wilcox and spent much of the past week heaping praise on his California counterpart.
The affinity between the two might also be a result of the similar seasons they've gone through this year as well.
Both the Golden Bears (7-5) and Fighting Illini (6-6) endured four-game losing streaks. Both dealt with starting quarterbacks who were in and out of the lineup because of injuries. And both had to rely on their defense to salvage their seasons.
Not surprisingly, both coaches see Monday's game at Levi's Stadium as an opportunity to build momentum for next season.
"Our program has made so many strides this year," Smith said. "What a bowl victory would do would just give us momentum going into the next year as much as anything. We didn't finish the season up the way we wanted, so to have a good taste in our mouth would be pretty important for us."
Illinois feels a lot better about its chances now that quarterback Brandon Peters has been cleared to play. Peters sat out the team's regular-season finale with a concussion, and there were concerns he would have to miss the Redbox Bowl before doctors approved his return.
"I don't have any concerns because our medical staff, they did it the right way," Peters said. "We went through all the steps that needed to be done. I feel fine. I feel great."
A graduate transfer from Michigan, Peters passed for 1,611 yards and 17 touchdowns with seven interceptions. He'll be facing a California pass defense that has been one of the best in the country over the past two seasons.
"One thing about Brandon, he's even-keel and that's a good thing. I saw that the first time we brought him over for a visit," Smith said. "Just thought he would be a perfect fit for what we're trying to do."
Wilcox had similar feelings about Chase Garbers, who was part of a three-man quarterback rotation a year ago before settling in as the starter this season.
Like Peters, Garbers has been beset by injuries. He missed four games and parts of two others with a shoulder injury he suffered early in the year. The Bears are 6-0 this season when Garbers plays at least a full half.
California will be without three starters, two on defense and one on offense. Safety Ashtyn Davis had a minor medical procedure, outside linebacker Tevin Paul will also sit out and wide receiver Jordan Duncan was excused from the team for personal reasons.
The Bears have good depth at receiver and linebacker, but losing Davis is a serious blow. He was one of the leaders in Cal's secondary and doubled on special teams as a kick returner. Cornerback Elijah Hicks has been practicing at safety and Camryn Bynum has spent time there as well.
Illinois has its own health concerns. Top wide receiver Josh Imatorbhebhe (33 catches, 634 yards, nine TDs) has been dealing with an unspecified injury and will be a game-time decision along with linebacker Jake Hansen, who has been out since Nov. 2.
California linebacker Evan Weaver has been a dominant force in the middle of the Bears' defense and is closing in on the NCAA single-season record for tackles. Weaver has 173 and needs 21 more to break the 17-year-old record of 193 held by Lawrence Flugence of Texas Tech. Coincidentally, Illinois linebacker Dele Harding is the second-leading tackler in the country behind Weaver with 147.
Reggie Corbin and Dre Brown have formed a prolific 1-2 punch while splitting time in the Illinois backfield. Corbin has 634 yards and six touchdowns on 129 carries, while Brown tallied 545 yards and five TDs on 102 attempts.


text:
Belgium is the perfect place to experience a great mix of French and Flemish culture. There are many vibrant cities in Belgium. Bruges, considered the 'Venice of the North' is a popular destination for city breaks and short holidays. Other cities such as Ghent have a have a rich culture for those who are interested in exploring this historical medieval town. Known for its tranquil surroundings, great older examples of architecture, fabulous food and abundance of museums and art galleries, Belgium has everything for the perfect, peaceful European holiday.
Driving in Belgium
Road Driving Side
Urban Speed Limit
Rural Speed Limit
Motorway Speed Limit
Important things to note
If your vehicle is stationary, you must turn the engine off unless it's absolutely necessary.
The use of cruise control is banned on some motorways that are prone to congestion.
Vehicles must be parked on the right hand side of the road.
You cannot use a mobile handset for calls, texts or internet while driving as this is against the law. It is recommended to use a hands-free kit if you want to speak on your mobile phone whilst driving.
Driving culture in Belgium
What are the roads like Belgium?
The majority of motorways in Belgium are toll-free and while most of the roads in the dense network of motorways are in good condition, many secondary roads are poorly maintained. It's also worth noting that a lot of the motorway signs are somewhat misleading and unclear. Many motorway signs also vary as to whether the signs are in French or Flemish, which can be confusing.
What are Belgian drivers like?
On the whole, drivers in Belgian are both patient and courteous and driving standards are very good. If you decide to be patient and courteous, it will be recognised by Belgian drivers
What are the best times to drive?
It's best to avoid cities during rush-hour, particularly Brussels which is renowned for early morning tailbacks. Otherwise, throughout the day and at weekends is recommended, but be sure to plan ahead and to take national holidays into account.
What are the driving laws?
It's important to understand who to give priority to. Priority must be given to the right. Trams are always given priority as are buses that are pulling out in built up areas.
As pedestrian crossings are not controlled by traffic lights, the general rule is for vehicles to slow down on their approach and give way to pedestrians waiting to cross.
It is compulsory to wear seatbelts in both front and rear seats of the vehicle.
Children under 18 must wear an appropriate child restraint for their age whenever seated in the front or rear seats of the vehicle.
It is compulsory to travel with a reflective safety jacket in the vehicle in case of breakdown. The jacket must be worn by the driver as soon as they leave the vehicle.
It is also compulsory to travel with a warning triangle, fire extinguisher and First-Aid kit in the vehicle